Coaching a Global Agile Virtual Team

Virtual teams, with a high level of interdependence and cooperation among team members, are the building block of successful global software organizations. While becoming agile helps on communication and collaboration, such teams meet several challenges in the form of cultural differences, language barriers, national traditions, different values and norms, lack of face-to-face communication, time-zone differences, and difficulties in building and maintaining trust. A successful agile virtual team needs to have the right structure, but equally important is the ability to improve as a team, to become self-managing with shared decision-making and shared leadership. It takes a long time to form such a team, and expert coaching is needed. We describe and discuss how one team leader coached and improved a global virtual agile team at a large savings and insurance company over a period of one year. Because the team members had overlapping working hours the team was able to base coordination on mutual adjustment and frequent feedback. Social software and face-to-face meetings were important factors to achieve this. By involving the remote developers in the strategy of the product, enabling everyone to pick their own tasks, and focusing on continuous learning, knowledge sharing and team build activities, the team members became highly motivated and self-managing.